Dakota Beacon

Ronald Reagan was a remarkable negotiator, both incredibly patient and principled. Negotiating was one of Reagan’s greatest but most unappreciated attributes, to the point where I’ve many times considered doing a book strictly on Reagan as a negotiator.

I’m not privy to the records on all of President Obama’s negotiations with House Republicans like Eric Cantor and John Boehner. From what I’m reading, however, we’re seeing a very different kind of chief executive. Barack Obama is not only no Ronald Reagan on economic policy. He’s also no Reagan when it comes to negotiating skills. Obama doesn’t understand Reagan at all, and that’s a loss for this nation.

All politicians are not created equal. The House Republican freshmen represent the real heroes in this debt debacle. Their constituents elected them, many of them Tea Party supporters, to stop the inside-the-beltway spending insanity. These freshmen do not care whether they are re-elected or receive plumb committee assignments. Their vote is not for sale. They were sent on a mission and are holding true to their constituents and their principles. These freshmen cannot be bought or cajoled or arm-twisted. This is what a term limited congress might look like -- more substance and less posturing.

High taxation suffocates prosperity.  Progressives’ religious zeal stifles economic growth.  The progressive worldview darkens the human story.

From the unlikeliest place comes a most fitting condemnation of the progressive worldview.  In Emile, his treatise on education, eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau — a father of progressivism — declared, “Whatever you do, your actual authority can never extend beyond your own powers.”¹  But today’s ideologically fixated progressives refuse to give up the pursuit of superhuman dominance.  Progressive politicians seek control over others using government force.  These hopelessly misguided creatures will always need more and more of other people’s money to fund a quest for relevance in their own lives.

The general acquiescence of Americans in authoritarian government would astonish our ancestors. We no longer ask by what authority the government does what it does; we may obey or evade its dictates, but we don't question its authority to issue them. We don't even insist that it observe its constitutional limitations. We don't presume to tell it what the Constitution means; instead, it tells us!

And yet we continue to pretend we live in a constitutional democracy. To borrow the language of psychobabble, we are trapped in an abusive relationship with our own government, but we are in deep denial about it.

For dominant powers in decline, it starts with the money, for Washington as for London and Rome before it. But it never stops there. The horizons shrivel. Two-bit provocateurs across the map pick off remnants of the old order with ever greater ease.

America has had two roles in a so-called “globalized” world: America’s government was the guarantor of global order; America’s economy was the engine of global prosperity. Right now, both roles are up for grabs. And there are no takers for the former. Pace Nancy Pelosi, “life on this planet as we know it today” is going to change, and very fast.

The Rep. Alan West - Debbie Wasserman Schultz incident illustrates a great deal about nearly every political conflict between Republicans and Democrats. Certainly it’s the case that our political parties represent opposing principles of politics: Republicans more generally stand for principles of limited government, while Democrats espouse views that reflect the statist ideology of European social democracies. But as the West v. Wasserman Schultz controversy demonstrates, the differences between the parties really go beyond this rather facile distinction.

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If enacted, new regulatory criteria will reclassify many foods which the FDA presently considers unhealthy as off limits for advertising to children. In the present formulations, eighty-eight of the top 100 most-consumed foods will be considered ineligible for advertising. “Unhealthy” foods won’t be able to be marketed using in-store displays, TV, radio, the Internet, printed media, movie theater concessions, video games, and various other outlets.

One of man's favorite animals is the dolphin. This sportive sea mammal has long enjoyed better press than, say, Fred Astaire. In France it was a symbol of royalty; Shakespeare uses it as a symbol of aquatic grace and beauty. Legends of its beneficence to shipwrecked sailors have circulated since ancient Greece.

The dolphin has been taking us for a ride. But in fairness, we've wanted to be fooled. The benign animal, infused with evolutionary wisdom, has replaced the noble savage in the sentimental mythology that perennially asks why civilized human beings can't just return to Nature. Illusions about Nature are of a piece with liberal illusions about human nature and the possibility of universal peace and brotherhood.

 Massive cuts are imperative. Last year, the U.S. Treasury incurred $3.3 trillion of new debt to finance the government’s on-budget and off-budget spending. This $3.3-trillion deficit cannot be closed with taxes. The total income of Americans above the $250,000 threshold that President Obama uses to designate ‘rich Americans’ amounts to approximately $1.4 trillion. If the government taxed it all, we would still be around $2 trillion short. There literally is no other way to close the deficit than to slash federal spending drastically. None of the proposed reforms would reduce debt; they would merely increase it less than now planned. Bottom line, whatever deal is struck now will not solve our long-term fiscal problems. The ongoing political maneuvering has given us glimpses of how sick our political system is.

After a tragedy such as the one experienced in Norway we must try to learn something from it. It is, in these cases, far less relevant to know just what motivated the killer (these factors are imponderables in a crazy person anyway) than it is to know what made it possible for him to act out. After all, the motives of an insane person don’t apply very well to other situations. The nature of the victims, more truly representative of society, or rather the state of the victims (unarmed) and the conditions of the killing site are far more relevant than what the killer has been reading.

The temporary cost of refusal to increase the debt limit will expose the falsehoods of the addict and the addict’s enablers. It will give the American people a small taste of what is to come of our nation if federal spending is allowed to accelerate as it has in the last two years. And voters may then continue to remove all long term incumbents at the ballot box in order to restore free market America.

How long before some starry-eyed but angry-faced Democrat proposes legislation to force “healthy food” advertising? Food totalitarians think that human nature can be remolded by anointed administrators using food rules concocted by anointed experts, that “psychic or economic rewards” can be rendered irrelevant, that humans will then crave organic beet juice and bean sprouts instead of beer and hot dogs. Liberals think that the impossible can be willed into existence by force of law.

It is disturbing to observe the ease with which some conservatives fall in line with the progressive notion that government should engage in “crafting public policy.” Governmental public policy ends up being dogma-pushing by the elitists who happen to be in control at the time when said “public policy” is enacted. The Heritage Foundation and other conservatives should not fall for progressive nonsense.

Poor people’s best hope is for America to return to its libertarian roots. The best “help” for the poor comes from private enterprise. And private enterprise thrives when government gets out of its way.

You are a colossal fraud, sir.  You talk to us as though we are children.  You scold and insult the people we sent to Washington to stop you in your maniacal spending spree.  You intone threateningly, Chicago-style, that the poor will pay.  News flash: the poor will pay either way.  We’ve already been paying for your four-year vacation.  Enough already.  Don’t attempt to extort cooperation from senior citizens, don’t try to coerce Congress.  Don’t make another speech to us until you have something new to say, something along the lines of what you are cutting in the way of spending.  And, by the way, it might be a good idea to start packing.

The financial constraints and regulations congress is so fond of imposing on the private sector should apply equally to government departments. The biggest monopoly and money waster in America today is the federal government. The price we pay for cavalier spending is bankruptcy.

This is what America gets for electing a community organizer with no private enterprise experience and only 142 days in the US Senate.

My guess? Obama does not want to be Jimmy Carter II. Obama will cave in and, if he does, God bless America.

With or without laws that require adult involvement for kids to have questionable material, parents must be parents. Laws are no substitute for parental monitoring. While I find the Court’s decision disappointing, it highlights the need for parents to be proactive and willing to make tough decisions.

Should a 13-year-old be able to purchase a school-shooting simulator without parents’ knowledge or consent The research on the effects of violent video games shows that parents and society have reason to be concerned. Today, we are not talking about the games from my youth like Space Invaders or games that involved a cartoon-like image of a person falling over. We are talking about games with graphic, movie-quality images of death and dismemberment. Unlike a movie, however, which is viewed passively, game players are actively causing the scenes which unfold before them.

It was 20 years ago this summer that the final disintegration of the Soviet Union rapidly unfolded... Historians debate the credit that goes to various players for that collapse, from Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, to name a few. These are the people who get books written about them. But there were many behind-the-scenes players who performed critical roles that have never seen the light of a historian’s word processor. Here I’d like to note one such player: Herb Meyer. Specifically, I’d like to highlight a fascinating memo Meyer wrote eight years before the Soviet collapse. This Memo ought to rank among the most remarkable documents of the Cold War.”

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Earlier this month, Moody’s downgraded Irish government debt to junk. Which left the Irish somewhat peeved. The Department of Finance pointed out that it had met all the “quantitative fiscal targets” imposed by the European Union, and the National Treasury Management Agency said that Ireland was sufficiently flush “to cover all its financing requirements until the end of 2013”.

Which is more than the Government of the United States can say.

The modern world is like a perpetual Nuremburg rally: everything that was wrong with Nazi Germany is more or less typical of other modern states, even those states that imagine they are the opposite of Nazi Germany. Political enemies usually turn out to be cousins, whose most violent differences are essentially superficial, masking deeper agreements in principle. Stalin, Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill were closer to each other than they realized; so are Bill Clinton and Slobodan Milosevic.

Treasury confirms that the process was used in past debt crises. Geithner surely know this. Obama should know. If the President is aware of the workaround process, then he is revealing himself to be a liar by making bogus Social Security nonpayment threats to Seniors. If Obama is unaware of the accounting solution, then he is, once again, ignorant.

Neither the dishonesty nor bewilderment scenario should surprise the American people at this point.

Never mind that communism had killed tens of millions of people: communist sympathies were signs of good taste, while anti- communism was vulgar, silly, and vicious. Most liberals could always forgive a communist, but never a Joe McCarthy. "McCarthyism" signified not only tyranny, but, worse, low company and bad taste. Nowhere was this truer than in the prestigious universities of the Ivy League, where the nominal egalitarians of the Left enlisted snobbery as their weapon of choice against the reactionary Right.

Democrat Senate Budget Chair Senator Kent Conrad and the Democrats have not offered the American people a budget in over two years as required by law. Over that period they have increased spending by trillions on programs that we cannot afford like Nationalized Healthcare. Now that the adults are in charge and trying to write a budget, Democrats are throwing a temper tantrum. Democrats have done everything but show us their plan.

As our nation nears bankruptcy, Americans must watch and learn. We must realize why the left needs to be thrown out of power for good. That includes “Republicans in name only”.

This brings us to yet another reason why I oppose hate-crime legislation.  Not only is it an attempt at thought control, as it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the extra punishment it mandates is for the thoughts expressed through the commission of the crime, but it will never be applied equally.  The government just has too much room to fudge when it’s assigned the role of mind-reader.  And in a politically correct time, it’s not hard to figure out what form that fudging will take.  Hate-crime laws are not designed to punish hate, but, rather, the thoughts, actions and groups the Left hates.

What Obama has done in the education arena has weakened education. What the man has done overall has weakened America. Obama’s economic policies have hurt the middle class. Yet reality doesn’t seem to register with the progressives at the NEA. After all, to lefty zealots such as those who populate NEA leadership, “talking about the importance” of something is as valuable as actually making that something happen. Having a “vision for a stronger America” makes America stronger. To the NEA’s starry-eyed “educators,” just as with all staunch liberals, noble intent is everything. Results are irrelevant.